Phantom Stalker, Spectral Hound and Twinling

Phantom Stalker from the original AD&D Fiend Folio

Seven Voyages of Zylarthen Supplement 1: Book of Spells includes three spells that annoyingly refer to Supplement 2: Book of Fiends. I say "annoyingly" because Book of Fiends has not yet been published (It's written, but this time I'm pursuing a different option for the art):

Phantom Stalker: This spell summons a Phantom Stalker. See Supplement 2: Book of Fiends for characteristics and effects. Magic-Users. Level: 5.

Spectral Hound: This spell summons a Spectral Hound to track opponents. See Supplement 2: Book of Fiends. Magic-Users. Level: 4.

Twinling: See Supplement 2: Book of Fiends. Magic-Users. Level: 6.

Not a lot to go on there, obviously. So here are those creatures (two days ago I also added them as an addendum to the Electronic Edition PDF):

PHANTOM STALKERS: Hit Dice: 6. Attacks: 2-12. Armor Class: 3. Move: 12/24. Alignment: Neutrality. Languages: Type J plus Simple Common. Number Appearing: 1. Description: These are invoked in a manner similar to Invisible Stalkers but their purpose is to guard and avenge. Only one may be created at one time, and they will never leave the initial area—castle, tower, underground lair—they were initially called to, unless it is to avenge the death of their master. If their master is killed, the Stalker will be implacable in tracking his killer, wishing to fulfill the terms of the summoning and return to its abode as quickly as possible. It may Polymorph Self and Fly but will usually appear as an 8’ tall, reddish humanoid with fiery eyes. A Phantom Stalker is immune to fire-based attacks but saves against cold attacks at a -2 penalty and takes an extra hit of damage per die. If slain, the creature will explode in a six-die Fire Ball. Of course, since the Stalker values its own life as much as any creature, he will attempt to make use of this as a threat, revealing it to his attackers if cornered.

SPECTRAL HOUNDS: Hit Dice: 5. Attacks: 2-12 plus possible extra-powerful bite. Armor Class: 7. Move: 24. Number Appearing: 1. Description: Via a powerful spell, a supernatural canine is created that will inexorably track and close in on its target, as long as something with the victim’s scent is initially presented. The creature will take 3-18 days to reach its victim, and on the final 3-6 days the victim will hear a howling coming progressively nearer. If possible, the Hound will attack while the victim is alone, and it will usually surprise on a 1-4. If, during melee, the “to hit” roll succeeds by +4 or more, double damage will be inflicted due to the Hound sinking its teeth into the throat. In addition, after such a bite the victim will go comatose for 2-8 turns and then die at the end of that period unless surgery, a Cure Light Wounds spell or similar or more powerful magic is administered in the interim.

TWINLINGS: Description: A Twinling is created by the horrible spell of the same name, and thus the victim is allowed a saving throw to immediately dispel it. If this is failed, then a perfect double of the victim—with the same current hit points, spells, magic items, and so on—instantly attacks, though it will be invisible as well as invulnerable to all others, and it will look as if the victim is batting the air. The monster will continue to attack until either it or its victim is dead.

These three monster descriptions actually give a bit if insight into the methodology behind the forthcoming Book of Fiends. The idea was to track and reimagine (not duplicate!) the original Fiend Folio. Essentially that meant four things.

1. Any monsters not in the SRD (the Fiend Folio has many of those) or that weren't to some extent legally "freed" by Necromancer Games' 2011 Tome of Horrors would have to be reworked and renamed, at the least. In many cases this meant keeping some of the stats but inserting the creature into a different ontological space, so to speak. So for example, many planar or just plain bizarro creatures (the Fiend Folio had many) often became extraterrestrials from, say, one of Pluto's moons, or evil faerie creatures. I actually think this worked out perfectly for the Zylarthen/OD&D vibe I wanted to preserve, but I'm sure that a few Fiend Folio fans will miss some of their favorites.
2. Silly (in my opinion), broken or superfluous monsters would be reimagined. Now don't misunderstand. I love the Fiend Folio, and that includes loving some Fiend Folio monsters that most people seem to hate. (I also dislike a few that many people seem to love.) But there were a number, many of them also SRD or present in Tome, that I felt just didn't work, or at least wouldn't work for Zylarthen. One example is the Adherer. There's nothing inherently wrong (and a lot inherently right) about a monster that is, well, sticky. But the way it was initially presented in the Fiend Folio, including that (in my opinion) unfortunate illustration, as a sort of DM "gotcha" monster - you think it's a standard mummy, but think again! - was just (again, in my subjective opinion) annoying. So I reworked them as amphibians.
3. All monster descriptions would be reduced to stripped-down OD&D/Zylarthen style. One of the things I didn't like about the Folio (and to some extent the original AD&D Monster Manual) was how long some of the descriptions were. I always felt I had to reread them five times just to make sure I didn't miss some little extra spell or odd ability. In many cases, this meant replacing a page or half-page length description with a short paragraph. I like that sort of presentation much better. But, again, opinions obviously differ on this. The two conceptions are just different. One is OD&D, and one is AD&D, if you will.
4. But all Fiend Folio monsters would be represented, at least in some form. In many cases this "representation" is extremely tangential. CIFAL's became Wasp Zombies (actual zombies with venomous wasps crawling out of orifices in their bodies), Flinds (relatives of Gnolls) became non-described Gibbelins (relatives of Dunsany's non-described Gnoles), The Hound of Ill Omen became Prophecy Worms, Snyads became Termite Men, Mites became Water Gnomes, Norkers became Aquatic Hobgoblins and the Nonafel (Cat O'Nine Tails) became just a standard panther. And so on. Sorry Nonafels.

So, the Phantom Stalkers is quite similar to its originals, or, rather, to the OGL version presented in Tome of Horrors. But the description is stripped down, and the possible planar origins of the creature are left unmentioned.

The Spectral Hound was originally a Devil Dog. Not much similarity there except for the dog and the throat biting thing, I suppose. But I felt there were too many standard canine variations in Folio (and there already were Hell Hounds and Blink Dogs, etc. in OD&D and AD&D). So I thought a sort of less powerful version of the Invisible Stalker spell would be fun.

I had actually forgotten that the Twinling was a reworking of the Aleax. I kept the evil twin idea (which was a damn good one) but made it into an evil spell, as opposed to a sending of the gods, or whatever it was in Folio. And I thought all the extra detail about regeneration and so on was superfluous. It's bad enough to find yourself up against your evil twin in a duel to the death where no one else can help you!

By the way, just so no one misunderstands. I don't think Zylarthen's Book of Fiends is better than its semi-parent (such a thought would be insane). Rather, it's simply my imperfect effort to re-imagine it (or re-imagine some of it) in a legally viable and (hopefully) fun way for the Zylarthen/OD&D universe.

Good hunting and happy casting!

Phantom Stalker from Necromancer Games' Tome of Horrors

What is Book of Spells? Part 1: Magic-Users

Gate

What is Book of Spells?

The short answer is that it's a spell catalog for the Seven Voyages of Zylarthen universe, containing 296 spells presented alphabetically, approximately half of which are new to Zylarthen. Some of the old spells have been rewritten and shuffled around slightly among classes and levels. Thus, Magic-Users now have 216 spells - 30 per level for levels 1-6 and 12 per level for levels 7-9. And Witches and High Priests each have completely unique lists of 40 spells - or "powers" for High Priests. In the process, the Witch and High Priest NPC classes have been somewhat re-designed. Book of Spells also contains new rules for age and aging, a table for item saving throws, and an optional rule for higher-level characters doing extra damage. As with volumes 1-4, it exclusively makes use of the wonderful illustrations of John Dickson Batten - all "new" ones, so to speak.

It's currently available on Lulu, in physical booklet form for $6.95 and as part of a revised Seven Voyages of Zylarthen Electronic Edition for $9.95.

I'm going to break the longer answer up into three parts. Today I'll focus on Magic-User spells.

Let me go back a step and describe what was done for spells in the original Zylarthen. In the foreword to Vol. 1, I implied that the game was based solely on OD&D's "three little brown books," published in 1974. That was true for classes, abilities and (roughly) the combat mechanism. But attentive readers of Zylarthen and these blog posts know that monsters, magic items and spells tracked the first two-years of Dungeons & Dragons, taking things through the late fall of 1975. Or, in other words, I made use not only of the three little brown books but also Greyhawk and the first four issues of The Strategic Review. Most spells were inspired by these sources. There were a few original ones, and we declined to use some others, most notably the upper-level Magic-User spells (levels 7-9) of Greyhawk and roughly half of the Illusionist spells of Strategic Review. Of the spells we used, Magic-Users got all of the Magic-User spells and some of the Cleric spells. NPC High Priests (clerics) got a list similar, though not identical to, the OD&D list, the bulk of it shared with Magic-Users. Witches got a mix of the most "witchlike" Magic-User, Cleric and Illusionist offerings. Again, a few were unique, but most were shared.

The original tally looked like this:

• Magic Users: 120 spells (20 for each of levels 1-6).
• Evil High Priests: 36 spells (5 for each of levels 1-3, and 7 for each of levels 4-6).
• High Priests: 36 spells (5 for each of levels 1-3 ,and 7 for each of levels 4-6).
• Witches: 60 spells (10 for each of levels 1-6).

However, if you took out the overlaps, the number of distinct spells equaled 150. Out of the 132 Priest and Witch spells, only 30 were unique to those classes.

For Book of Spells, we added the high-level spells in Greyhawk and expanded the time frame through mid-1977, thus stopping right before the start of the publication of AD&D. The additional sources we tracked were Eldritch Wizardry, Gods, Demi-Gods and Heroes, the Holmes Basic set, and two articles from early issues of Dragon magazine. Not all the Dragon spells were used, and we should note that for spells not in the 3.5 or 5.0 SRD, if we used them, we were pretty careful to use them as jumping off points only, re-imagining and (usually) renaming them, at least in so far as their names and effects were not obvious, generic or taken from some other source - such as the Conan stories.

I'll discuss Witches and High Priests in more detail in parts 2 and 3, but the idea was to give them completely unique lists, letting them keep a few of the OD&D spells, but transferring the bulk to Magic-Users. This time, a larger number of spells (perhaps 70 or so) were either original to me or re-imagined (and usually renamed) from another early TSR game. OSRites will easily be able to identify it. The idea was to really make Witches and High Priests different from Magic-Users, as well as more witchlike or priestlike (though my angle on priestlike may surprise a few of you), while letting Magic-Users have 95%+ of the OD&D spells. Giving the vast majority to that player-character class seemed like the right thing to do.

So here's the new tally:

• Magic Users: 216 spells (20 for each of levels 1-6, and 12 for each of levels 7-9).
• High Priests (including Evil High Priests - there is now technically no distinction in the spell lists): 40 - not separated by level.
• Witches: 40 - not separated by level.

So, many of the "new" Magic-User adds were Druid spells from Eldritch Wizardry (I always liked the spells but hated the limiting nature of the class - at least for player-characters) and the left-out higher-level spells from Greyhawk.

But I don't want you think that Book of Spells was merely an exercise in mashing those spells in (there wouldn't have really been a point if that had been the case). Rather, the parts and the whole had to work for the vibe of the game and for how "magic" would now be separated from witcheries and the deity bestowed "powers" of priests. I also took the opportunity to "fix" a number of spells that I either felt were broken or whose descriptions were annoyingly vague or unclear.

Here are a few spells that I tried to fix:

• Color Spray
• Heat Metal
• Magic Missiles (yes, the "s" is intentional)
• Sleep (it's scaled back a bit to its original conception of having only a 10' x 10' area of effect - but 1st level Magic-Users now have a few other nice offensive spells to compensate)

Here are some spells that were reimagined and (usually) renamed:

• Fear Touch
• Hurrah!
• Itch
• Surrender or Die!
• Create Fog
• Call Animals (I, II and III)
• Monster Summoning (I through IX - yes, you can now summon monsters at 1st level)

Here are some spells that have only a tangential relation (if that) to their originals:

• Drain-Magic Ray
• Stun Ray
• Freeze Ray
• Lava Circle

And here are some that, as far as I know, are original to Zylarthen, but seemed to fit:

• Spectral Hound
• Phantom Stalker
• Twinling
• Cone of Cold (sort of original - some monsters in OD&D could do it)
• Create Breathable Water
• Time Travel (this is a 9th level spell, and like Teleport carries a significant chance that the result might be somewhat "off")

I have to admit that the first three require the forthcoming Book of Fiends to be understood or used, but I'll post the necessary monster descriptions on this blog in the next few days.

As with the original Zylarthen, two versions of Raise Dead were reworked into super-healing spells. There are still no Wish spells (you have to have a ring or perhaps a sword for those). And there are only one-and-a-half spells from the set of "Phantasmal" illusion offerings - I had always felt that too many illusions and "I disbelieves" always threatened to ruin things.

"White Puff Ball Spell" was TSR's Gods, Demi-Gods and Heroes name for a spell described in the (now public domain) Conan story, "The Black Circle." Since TSR sort of lifted the spell from the story at a time when the story was not public domain, and subsequently permanently deleted it, I felt that using their wonderful name for the effect in the now pubic domain story was fair game. Alas, since Forlorn Incistment (another Gods, Demi-Gods and Heroes spell name that TSR lifted - though with a different spelling - and then deleted) is from a work not yet in the public domain, I followed TSR's route in AD&D and the SRD in renaming it as the much more boring "Imprisonment."

I like the new Magic-User lists a lot. I feel that there's a great mix of spells at each level - from offensive to defensive to just useful to weird to, in a few cases, downright creepy. And while some "balance" is good - in determining which level to assign a spell to, for example - the overall goal was to make things fun.

See the end of this post for page scans of the full Book of Spells Magic-User list.

A word on round/turns: I don't really want to get into a big argument about this here, and I know that some people I respect hold a different position, but I came to feel that breaking time units down into rounds/turns as opposed to the more elastic conception of turns/melee turns/full turns was actually what Gygax and Arneson intended back in 1974, though their presentation was certainly confusing. In other words, rounds/turns was NOT a "naturalistic" accretion of AD&D. (Thinking that it was was the main reason I didn't originally go with it in the original Zylarthen.) But perhaps more importantly, Since Zylarthen's first publication, I came to feel that using an explicit rounds/turns scheme for spell duration was much less potentially confusing. So, for Book of Spells and the revised Book of Magic ALL spells were rewritten using the rounds/turns methodology. I imagine this will make some people happy while annoying a few others. But there it is.

At the same time, for Book of Spells and the revised Book of Magic, I got rid of most instances where spell range, duration or effect varied according to level. I now feel that such variances were an illegitimate accretion from the original Vancian inspiration, even if they were present, at least to a small degree, even in the 1974 booklets.

Finally, how does Supplement I: Book of Spells impact the already existing Vol. 3: Book of Magic? I elected to port rewrites and changes from Book of Spells back to Book of Magic, thinking this would be the least confusing alternative. In other words, purchasers of the new Electronic Edition of Zylarthen or the revised physical booklet of Book of Magic will notice that the Magic-User spell lists and descriptions in Book of Magic are slightly different from how they used to be. But Book of Magic still only has 120 spells for Magic-Users, and stops at 6th level. Sleep is a bit less of a mini-nuke, but in return you get Color Spray, multiple Magic Missiles (though they still DON'T hit automatically) and if you use Book of Spells, you can now summon a Goblin, Giant Centipedes or even Green Slime (whatever the referee determines that to even mean) to do your bidding.

Unless you end up with a Butterfly Rabble.

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Magic-User spell list from Supplement I: Book of Spells:

Magic-User spell list from the revised Vol. 3: Book of Magic:

Book of Spells for Zylarthen Released!

It's been a long time coming, but I've finally released Book of Spells, the 1st supplement for Seven Voyages of Zylarthen.

It's available in booklet form and as an "extra" in the also newly released Zylarthen Electronic Edition, which consolidates revised versions of the first four volumes in a bookmarked 336 page PDF file.

Here's an excerpt from the foreword:

Book of Spells, the first supplement for SEVEN VOYAGES of ZYLARTHEN, almost doubles the number of spells in the ZYLARTHEN catalog from 150 to 296.

Part of the idea was to continue the process of “re-imagining” the original fantasy adventure game through the midpoint of its fourth year, at least for spells. Thus, some of the “new” spells will be familiar.

Many of them were originally designed for a particular player-character class not available in ZYLARTHEN, although its more sinister non-player character relative survives (see Vol. 2 under “D”). Our own view is that the spells were wonderful, but the player-class itself was limiting. We think they work better if they simply expand the choices for all Magic-Users.

We also somewhat redefined the ZYLARTHEN Witch and High Priest classes. Both now have unique lists of spells—or “powers” in the case of High Priests—the majority of them being new to the universe of ZYLARTHEN as well as the original fantasy adventure game. We feel that the Witch spells make Witches more Witch-like, and the High Priest powers make High Priests more . . . perhaps alien is the right word.

In the process of conceiving Book of Spells we’ve also slightly rewritten many of the spells in Vol. 3 and changed the level of a few of them to better comport with the range of the expanded list. The duration for most spells is now defined in terms of “rounds” (10 to a turn) or “turns” (6 to an hour), as opposed to the more elastic scheme given in the original.

Spells and powers are listed in alphabetical order. All are fully compatible with ZYLARTHEN as first presented.

Revised rules for movement and time, tables for age and aging for player-characters (especially useful when assessing the effects of attacks by Ghosts and the like) and item saving throws (for all sorts of unpleasant situations) have also been provided. Finally, there is an optional rule for increasing the damage rolls for high-level player characters—if the players or referee feel that the original ZYLARTHEN scheme places them at a disadvantage against higher-level monsters with multiple dice of damage.

I'll be going into a bit more detail on what I did in Book of Spells, as well as discussing the Electronic Edition in subsequent posts.

I'm happy with the results, and I hope you will be too. If you would like to purchase either product (just in time for Halloween!), you can currently find them at the Zylarthen page on Lulu. (The Zylarthen box to the right will also bring you there.) But this time I also intend to offer both products at two other sites as well.

Cheers! And may you always find yourself upwind from a White Puff Ball spell.

Monster Summoning for Book of Spells

For the forthcoming Book of Spells, Supplement I for Seven Voyages of Zylarthen, I thought it would be fun to add a little color and detail to the Monster Summoning spells, as well as to add two lower-powered variations for use as 1st and 2nd level spells.

In my experience, people either love or hate the Monster Summoning spells. We love them because summoning monsters to do one's bidding is fun. We hate them because it may seem that the monsters that one gets are not very powerful relative to other spells at that level. I actually think the set is underrated, though some of it obviously depends on the situation and what one gets. But the least I could do was to give them a bit more flavor. What actually appears is, of course, random.

For good measure, I also fleshed out the Divine Aid spell for Zylarthen's Evil High Priests and High Priests (see end). In that case, the Priest gets to choose the monster (if he has a choice).

Monster Summoning I-IX:

Divine Aid: